This makes absolutely no sense to me. Why would you play a 4X game with little to no city building (AKA no colonization) and no taking over enemy cities? Why only have 2 or 3 cities on the WHOLE map.
Because you can? The great thing about a game like this is that it opens provides a playground for different strategies and play styles. The idea isn't to get the highest score, it's to play the funnest game for you.
One of the points to a 4X game is to EXPAND. And you Expand in two ways. 1. Conqure. 2. Colonize (build cities AKA. City spam)
And I would hate to see one of these ways taken out of the game (ie. Expand.)
And yes when you say you hate city spam that means you hate expandi plain and simple.
Who's saying that? Some people don't like to city-spam, ddd888 hates it, but nobody says it should be removed from the game. I just think there should be other options. Right now, the tradeoff between expansion and growth is so weak that expansion wins every time. The 3-turn minimum to build units is perhaps the most offensive design decision in that regard, but while %-when-idle isn't quite as egregiously STUPID it's similarly bad in the way it skews the game towards ever-more-cities.
